Contemporary technology such as a tablet PC allows individuals to write notes and other information such as sketches onto their computer screens. Handwriting may be recognized as text, and documents and the like may have annotations added thereto by annotation mechanisms. Annotations may even be searched as if they were text, as generally described U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/367,198, assigned to the assignee of the present invention. Such electronic searching capabilities provide benefits that are superior to paper notes.
However, while formal electronic documents may be annotated, in other scenarios existing annotation mechanisms still fall short of what users can do with paper. For example, such mechanisms are not able to reproduce the experience of several individuals seated around a table writing directly on a shared paper document. Although a computer user could email an annotated electronic document to other users, the step of emailing removes the immediacy that paper users would experience. It would be highly burdensome and interruptive for a user to have to perform such a file transfer every time the user wrote something down.
What is needed is a way for computer users to exchange electronic ink annotations with other users, in a manner that is essentially immediate and automatic, and handles one-to-many or many-to-many real time situations, such as note taking during a conference. The annotations should be useable with formal documents, but also should be able to be used with any publication, such as a slide of a presentation that appears on a user's computer screen.